Former FCC chair Michael Powell
As part of a historic nationwide wave of protests, a number of Chicago activists went to McCormick Place to protest a controversial vote held twenty years ago today — June 2, 2003.
On June 2, 2003, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3 to 2 to effectively eliminate the nation's remaining media ownership rules. This would have led to billions of dollars of transactions -- which were "cocked and loaded" (to quote the business press) waiting for the vote -- and would have changed for the worse what America saw, heard, and read, on television, radio, and in newsprint.
But that vote was blocked, and I'll explain why shortly. But first, some basics: Why is media ownership an important issue? Why did FCC vote as it did? And what stopped the FCC vote?
Since World War II, America has had rules in place limiting the number and types of media a single company could own, within a community and across communities. The line of thinking was that, just as a diversity of food sources and food types is necessary for a healthy diet, likewise a diversity of media voices is necessary for a healthy polity.
But from 1980 on, the "neoliberal" craze to reassert the primacy of business over life steadily worked to undo most of those rules. Thus, as journalist Ben Bagdikian chronicled in his book "The Media Monopoly" and the six editions that followed, the number of corporations that owned most American media steadily shrank from 50 in 1983 to just five in 2004.
It was more "efficient" for media businesses to produce content once and redistribute across a variety of different media outlets. But there are many negative effects to media concentration: less localism, less journalism, increased commercialism, less independence from the bottom line, more conflicts of interest, fewer diverse perspectives. But who would report this? The media?
Indeed, in September 2002 the FCC announced to almost no coverage that they would rewrite their remaining ownership rules, rendering them inert. Groups of media activists had rallied in response, trying to raise public awareness before the vote. As part of these efforts, a series of ownership hearings were held across America, including one in Chicago at Northwestern University Law School on April 2, 2002.
Curiously enough, those efforts got a boost from the 2003 War in Iraq. Surveys showed that about a third of Americans opposed the war before its launch, but there was nary any media attention of antiwar voices in the months before the war. That frustration brought kindling to a growing fire for media policy reform when word spread of what the FCC had planned (and spread very quickly via the nascent internet).
A record-setting deluge of popular feedback came to the FCC, almost all opposed to its plans. And for the first time ever, the FCC also faced popular protests in a dozen different cities. Chicagoans joined in protest at McCormick Place in early June 2003 at a convention of cable TV's biggest lobby, known then as the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA). By the way, the chair of the FCC at the time -- Michael Powell -- is now the NCTA's President.
Despite the opposition, the FCC plowed ahead with their vote, but the opposition fueled an emergency court order that blocked the vote and stopped the FCC's plan -- a block that lasted eight years.
It might seem like an eternity ago, in a very different media environment, but it's worth remembering and taking inspiration from what happened. As Illinois media scholar Robert McChesney wrote about the vote and the media ownership uprising of 2003: "[T]he very hardest battle has been won. Media reform is now thinkable. Nothing will ever be the same again."
